The Gun: A Violent History of the AK-47

It is perhaps the most potent question to echo from the cold war: Who lost Vietnam? Well, there were certainly many factors, but an important new book forces us to consider this: For the first time in human history, a poorly trained peasant army humbled a great power with the gun its fighters carried in their hands. This is the story of that gun, and of the scandalous way that Washington responded to it. An exclusive adaptation.

The Marines of Hotel Company's 1st Platoon spread out as they walked through the shin-high grass. In front of them was their next destination: the village of Ap Sieu Quan, a cluster of buildings surrounded by paddies and dikes just south of the demilitarized zone in the Quang Tri province of Vietnam. The village looked deserted and menacing in the rising late-morning heat. At least three North Vietnamese army battalions had infiltrated the area, an agricultural belt in the coastal lowlands where the jungles and mountains drained into the South China Sea. Hotel Company's 2nd Platoon had been hit by an NVA unit in Ap Sieu Quan a short while before. Now the company was converging. The Marines were exposed as they moved. The only approach passed over open ground. Staff Sergeant Claude Elrod, the platoon commander, was on edge. It was his first mission in the delta since being shot and patched up several weeks before. Ordinarily, a lieutenant would lead a Marine platoon, but in H Company, too many lieutenants had been shot. He walked near the front of the formation, sensing trouble ahead.

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Hotel Company was one of the bloodied outfits in 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, which in 1967 served as a mobile reaction force for much of Vietnam. It was July 21. Early the previous morning, several CH-46 helicopters had landed to the northwest, left the company behind, and roared back toward their ship off the coast. The insertion marked the opening of Operation Bear Chain, a mission to interdict food and ammunition caches along the road to Hue City, Da Nang, and Saigon. In theory, the battalion resided on amphibious ships as a theater reserve. In practice, its units were constantly ashore, shuttled from fight to fight. This had been the rhythm for months. Mission by mission, firefight by firefight, booby trap by booby trap, the rhythm had exacted its toll. The battalion's ranks had been thinned. The survivors were tired. Even after absorbing replacements who showed up between operations, the platoons fought at one-half to two-thirds strength, including men, like Elrod, who had been wounded but were judged fit enough to send back out.

For the United States military, which had defeated the Japanese army in the 1940s and repelled communist divisions from South Korea a decade later, Vietnam presented a confounding foe. The Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars were marginally educated, lightly equipped, minimally trained. More than half the NVA soldiers in late 1966 had six years or less of education, and three quarters of them had less than eighteen months in their army. They were peasants, agrarian villagers indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist ideology and fighting according to tactics articulated by Mao. American intelligence officials marveled that few of them had undergone significant training with live ammunition before being sent out against South Vietnamese and American forces. Many captured enemy fighters told of firing weapons for the first time only in combat. And yet by 1967 the Vietcong and the NVA were killing nearly eight hundred American servicemen each month.

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One reason for their success was their weapons. In the mid-1950s, the Kremlin had provided Mao's arms engineers with the technical specifications for its new assault rifle, the AK-47. China had set up assembly lines to make its own version — the Type 56 — and by 1964 had distributed huge quantities of these weapons in Southeast Asia. The weapons were in some ways the ultimate compromise firearm: Shorter and lighter than traditional rifles but larger than submachine guns, they could be fired either automatically or a single shot at a time. Their smaller, intermediate-power cartridges allowed soldiers and guerrillas to carry more ammunition into battle than before, and reduced the costs and burdens of resupply. All this and they were an eminently well designed tool — reliable, durable, resistant to corrosion, and with moderate recoil and a design so simple that their basics could be mastered in a matter of hours. A large fraction of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army combatants now carried these new assault rifles as their primary weapons. In some units the saturation rate was as high as 75 percent, and many soldiers had been given a basic load of 390 cartridges to go with their new gun. Vietnam was this new breed of rifleman's war: The majority of American combat fatalities, statistics would show, were caused by small-arms fire. This was new. For the first time, local fighters were a technological match against the well-equipped expeditionary forces of an empire. The battlefield had been leveled. Stalin's rifle, once a hushed secret, had broken out. It was changing the experience of small-unit war.

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Then came reaction. Since the AK-47, or Kalashnikov, had first surfaced, the American military had dismissed it as cheap and ineffective. But as this new weapon's cracking bursts were heard in battle each day, the Eastern bloc's assault rifle at last captured the Pentagon's attention. It marked the Kremlin's influence on how war was experienced by combatants of limited means — the Kalashnikov-carrying guerrilla, a common man with portable and easy-to-use automatic arms, was now in the field by the tens of thousands, and these men were outgunning American troops. To close the gun gap, the Pentagon rushed the M16 into service.

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Staff Sergeant Elrod was crossing the last ditch when a bullet smacked a bamboo branch near his head. He heard Kalashnikov fire as he dropped. Down the Marines of 1st Platoon went — shouting, returning fire, dashing in the pandemonium of first contact.

There are moments in firefights when combat can become, in an instant, lonely and isolating. Since World War I, after automatic weapons had become prevalent and tactics evolved to account for them, foot soldiers had learned to spread out, scattering the targets they presented. Dispersion reduced risks to units. It also served to increase the individual's sense of disassociation. One moment the soldier was part of a group. The next, in sudden battle, he could find himself alone. A man's world compressed to a frantic and companionless space, punctuated by the disorienting roars and blasts of incoming and outgoing fire.

Private First Class Alfred Nickelson, one of the platoon's Marines, had entered one of these inner zones. A bullet had passed so close by that it seemed to clap beside his ear. More bullets thumped the soil around him. He pressed himself down, trying to make himself small. For a few seconds, he had the selfish thought of a trapped man in what might be his last moment alive. All these guys out here in the field to shoot, he thought. Why are they trying to shoot only me? Then he collected himself. He knew each man's fate was tied to the platoon, and the platoon survived only if it fought. He would fight. He lifted his head and saw a Vietnamese soldier in a tree line. He raised his M16, lined up the rifle's sights, and eased back on the trigger. He had set his M16 selector switch on automatic. One round blasted out. Then nothing. His M16 had jammed. "Oh, fuck," he said.

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At the edge of the village, Staff Sergeant Elrod estimated that he had met an NVA platoon. The Marines of the 1940s and 1950s had faced human-wave attacks in Asia. This was something else. Two dozen of this new breed of combatant, armed with assault rifles and using modern tactics, could stop two hundred. First Platoon's Marines were flat to the ground. Bullets whipped around them. The staff sergeant needed firepower to match what was coming in. But something was wrong. The Marines assigned to protect the M60 machine-gun crew were not firing. They were crouched, madly working on their M16's. He ran to one of them. The man's rifle was jammed. The staff sergeant looked at the others. Their weapons were jammed, too. The United States Marine Corps, built around its riflemen, was in battle with rifles that did not work. Adrenaline pulsed through the staff sergeant. He was slicked with sweat, furious, confused. First Platoon was stuck.

Of the many effects of the international distribution of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, its influence on the American military was among the least understood and most profound. The AK-47's utility for guerrilla war, terror, and crime could have been readily foreseen. The bad choices it spurred in the Pentagon were not so predictable.

Throughout the 1950s, the United States had missed the significance of the spread of Eastern-bloc small arms. Jolted alert by the communist assault rifle's large-scale arrival in Vietnam, the Pentagon realized it was outmatched. The Army abruptly selected the M16 for general service in the war. Had the early M16 been reliable, this might have been a straightforward and simple development, a story as old as war. One side gets a new weapon, the other side matches it in kind. In this way, Vietnam became the first large conflict in which both sides carried assault rifles — initially in small numbers but eventually as the predominant firearm. But the American adoption of assault rifles flowed from reaction rather than from foresight or planning, and it was painful and bungled. Today the M16 is a quintessential American arm, the longest-serving standard infantry rifle in GI history, and a weapon familiar to millions of soldiers who have carried it and who have strong feelings about it, good or bad. The early M16 and its ammunition formed a combination not ready for war. They were a flawed pair emerging from a flawed development history. Prone to malfunction, they were forced into troops' hands through a clash of wills and egos in Robert McNamara's Pentagon. Instead of a thoughtful progression from prototype to general-issue arm, the M16's journey was marked by salesmanship, sham science, cover-ups, chicanery, incompetence, and no small amount of dishonesty by a manufacturer and senior military officers. Its introduction to war was briefly heralded as a triumph of private industry and perceptive management. It swiftly became a monument to the hazards of hubris and the perils of rushing, a study in military management gone awry.

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X-Rays by Nick Veasey

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An account of the M16's ascension from jet-age curio to standard American firearm could start in many places, but the velocity began with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Kennedy brought with him McNamara as secretary of defense. McNamara was a graduate of Harvard Business School, a former executive at Ford, and a believer in an approach to decision making called "systems analysis," which centered on intensive study of problems and options, with examinations of costs, benefits, and risks of potential decisions. McNamara and his followers saw themselves as a rarefied pool of talent, and they merged aggressive management style with a Kennedy mandate to look past nuclear war and develop the doctrine, organization, and equipment for flexible responses to conflicts overseas. This meant limited war, which further meant countering the Eastern bloc in proxy fights. Several of McNamara's officials turned their attention to the question of the rifle.

The rifle conundrum was significant. America's military machine had entered the nuclear age with an array of fearsome killing tools. The Air Force had supersonic jets and intercontinental missiles; the Army was fielding new battle tanks to enhance divisions that had settled into Europe; the Navy had launched a nuclear aircraft carrier. Yet when it came to the most basic tool of empire and of war — the infantry rifle — the Pentagon had sputtered and stalled. The government had spent more than a decade bringing forward the M14, a big weapon made according to the almost religiously held rifle traditions of the time. The M14 was a heavyweight and hewed closely to the legends of American frontier marksmen with eagle eyes and far-shooting, powerful rifles. Its automatic-fire version weighed more than twelve pounds, stretched almost four feet long, and had both tremendous recoil and heavy ammunition, which meant soldiers could carry a limited amount of rounds. The Army spent huge sums on its development, only to discover that soldiers equipped with M14's were outmaneuvered and outshot by opponents with AK-47's, which were almost perfectly suited to the short-range fighting in the vegetation of Vietnam. America's ordnance officials had lost the arms race of their lives. Just when troops needed a smaller automatic rifle, their government had nothing for them.

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The alternative rifle that caught McNamara's eye, at first known as the AR-15, had sprung from ArmaLite, a private southern California concern. ArmaLite was an infant and an upstart, a company that began as a workshop in the Hollywood garage of George Sullivan, the patent counsel for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Sullivan was an engineer fascinated with the possibilities of applying new materials to change the way rifles looked and felt. In 1953, he met Paul Cleaveland, secretary of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, at an industry luncheon. The pair talked about lightweight firearms and new ways to manufacture them. Cleaveland mentioned the conversation to Richard Boutelle, Fairchild's president, who was a gun buff, too. Boutelle and Sullivan agreed to collaborate, and ArmaLite was founded in 1954 as a tiny Fairchild division. It hired a former Marine, Eugene Stoner, as a designer.

One of the early creations was the AR-15, made at the informal request of an Army general who wanted a prototype rifle that would fire a small, high-speed round. The AR-15 looked like nothing else in military service. It had an aluminum receiver, plastic furniture, and an odd-looking carrying handle. It was thirty-nine inches long. It weighed, when unloaded, roughly 6.5 pounds, about half the weight of an automatic M14. Its appearance — small, dark, lean, and synthetically futuristic — stirred emotions. To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly toy. Wherever one stood, no one denied the ballistics were intriguing. Stoner had designed a narrow but powerful new cartridge, the .223, for his weapon. The cartridge's propellant and the AR-15's twenty-inch barrel worked together to move a tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds — in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound. Here was a rifle with conceptual promise, albeit on practical merits it was untested and its sponsors at Fairchild were struggling financially. In January 1959, with few customers in sight and the Pentagon committed to big rifles made according to old ideas, Fairchild transferred the AR-15's manufacturing rights to Colt's Firearms for $325,000 and a royalty-sharing guarantee.

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In summer 1960, Colt's took the AR-15 on the road, including to police departments around the United States, where its sales team fired into a variety of objects (automobiles and water cans were favorites) and engaged in giddy declarations of the rifle's powers. While automobiles were being pierced, punctured, and shredded, another salesman arranged for General Curtis LeMay, then the Air Force's vice chief of staff, to be invited to Boutelle's birthday party at Boutelle's gentleman's farm in Maryland. LeMay, like Boutelle, was a gun buff. The invitation was crafted to appeal. A sample AR-15, the new miracle gun, would be on hand for the general to fire. The party was held over the Fourth of July. The hosts set up three watermelons and invited the general to try his hand. What followed was one of the odder moments in arms-procurement history. Watermelons were bright and fleshy in ways water cans were not, and when struck by the little rifle's ultrafast bullets, the first two fruits exploded in vivid red splashes. LeMay was so impressed that he spared the last melon; the party decided to eat it. No doubt this was great fun. It was also nonsense. But salesmanship was salesmanship. Colt's salesman understood that the Air Force wanted its own automatic rifle for defending strategic-missile sites. He also knew that LeMay was unimpressed with the M14. Colt's, for the price of fresh fruit and cold cocktails, had a convert. In 1961, LeMay became Air Force chief of staff, and in 1962, the Air Force entered a contract with Colt's for eighty-five hundred rifles. This was a small order. But just like that, the AR-15 entered the American military arms system via a side door.

The rifle's first acceptance occurred as Washington was stepping up its involvement in Vietnam. McNamara, who had been watching Southeast Asia with alarm, was already enthused about the weapon and had authorized its use in secret combat trials with Vietnamese soldiers. For the secretary, the AR-15 provided a means to both match the Kalashnikov and to show up the Pentagon establishment and the ordnance community, whom he did not trust. Colt's new rifle had momentum.

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It is worth a pause to consider the significance of the step not taken.

After McNamara's team endorsed the assault-rifle concept, the United States military could have decided what it wanted an assault rifle to be and to do. This would have been a matter of proposing specifications for caliber, muzzle velocity, weight, accuracy, and any number of other characteristics. These specifications could then have been provided to government designers and private industry — to Ruger, to Colt's, to Remington, to Winchester, to Browning, to Cadillac Gage, and others — with a deadline for design submissions. In doing so, the intellectual capital of the private sector would have been invited to compete. And when the deadline came, the Pentagon would have had multiple designs from which to select. Instead, the United States had a hyped rifle rising through the bureaucracy with little testing or vigorous competition. Its selection process looked less like deliberation than lunging. And as McNamara and General William Westmoreland pushed and pulled the rifle along, the signs from tests and field reports of its emerging weaknesses were suppressed. Colt's assault rifle, the internal reports said, was vulnerable to corrosion and given to malfunctions. No matter. The most senior military officials knew American troops were being outshot. They ordered the M16 — as the military's version of the AR-15 was named — first in a batch of 104,000, and then as the standard firearm for the war. The rollout began.

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(Chervenak) Chuck Woodard; (Elrod) Claude Elrod

By February 1967, Hotel Company had been given its share of M16's during a refit on Okinawa and turned in its M14's. The troops grasped the advantages of a lightweight automatic rifle with little recoil. They knew they could now carry more rounds into each firefight. They were satisfied with how the rifles, fresh from crates, handled on ranges. There was concern about a shortage of cleaning gear, but otherwise everything seemed in order. A few weeks later, Hotel Company returned to Vietnam. On a sweep of the countryside on April 26, a few M16's jammed. But the fighting was not intensive. The problem was attributed to unfamiliarity with the rifle, perhaps combined with inadequate cleaning, though the Marines who were cleaning the weapons thought this was not so.

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Then came the shock. In late April, the battalion was preparing for combat against dug-in NVA units on Hills 861 and 881 near Khe Sanh.

On April 30, the company moved out on foot again, jumping into an attack at first light with 2nd and 3rd Platoons abreast of each other. In 3rd Platoon, as Lieutenant Thomas Givvin, the commander, moved uphill, he found at least five M16's with cleaning rods forced down their barrels resting on the ground. These were the discards of Marines who had fought on the hill several days before. Hotel Company walked through tall elephant grass and was attacked.

The ambush turned swiftly into a brutal close-quarters fight. Rifle by rifle, several of the Marines' new M16's jammed. The malfunctions had consistency; the most common was the failure of the rifle to extract a spent shell casing after a bullet was fired. To resume fighting, the troops needed to thread together a rifle-cleaning rod, plunge the rod down the barrel, and knock the spent case free, a movement akin to what soldiers did in the Revolutionary War. After conferring by radio with the battalion commander, the company commander, Captain Raymond Madonna, ordered the Marines to fall back so he could call in air strikes and artillery fire. The company suffered eight dead Marines and one dead corpsman that day. Forty-three others were wounded.

On May 3, the remnants of Hotel Company and part of Foxtrot Company were ordered to help Echo Company, which had been pinned down in front of a bunker network. Foxtrot would approach from the southeast. Hotel would attack from the north; its plan was to strike the enemy's rear. The Marines began a flanking movement down a ravine and through triple-canopy jungle; they moved for as long as nine hours. The company had only one platoon — 1st — still at fighting strength. As the sweat-soaked Marines at last moved near the bunkers and were preparing to rush, the captain gave an order over the radio to his platoon commander, Lieutenant Ord Elliott: Fix bayonets. He was effectively telling men to prepare to fight to the death, hand to hand. The order was superfluous. Elliott had already told the men to ready their knives. With bayonets affixed, the officers thought, the Marines whose M16's failed might slash or stab their way through the fight. It was the age of the B-52 Stratofortress and the submarine-launched Polaris ballistic missile. A Marine Corps platoon and company commander were preparing their men for an attack in which they would wield their rifles like lances, swords, and spears.

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The Hill Fights were among the bloodiest battles yet in the war. More than 150 Marines were killed. Several hundred more were wounded. Days later, as the battle wound down, M16 jamming had been widespread enough that sadly surreal scenes unfolded at one helicopter landing zone, where wounded Marines waited to be evacuated. Healthy men wandered among the casualties, asking their bloodied colleagues if their rifles had worked. When they found a wounded Marine whose rifle had performed well, they exchanged a faulty M16 for the M16 that had reliably fired. Initial acceptance of the M16's had turned to disgust. One survivor vented to the Asbury Park Evening Press: "Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us?" he wrote. "Our own rifle."

If the grim news and angry accounts from battle arrived as a surprise for the public, there was little about them that was surprising for those who manufactured and fielded the rifle. The M16's jamming was related to several factors — including changes to the ammunition's powder, poor corrosion resistance, an absence of chromium in the chambers, and others — that had previously been identified, either in the military's stateside testing or from examinations of rifles used in Vietnam. Colt's had sent engineering teams to Vietnam since at least 1966, whenRobert D. Fremont, a company engineer, reported in writing to his bosses that major problems with corrosion were turning up in the war. He recommended "the possible use of stainless steel for barrels or chrome plating the chambers and bores of the AR-15 weapons in order to combat corrosion and neglect." His summary was chilling. "Colt's weapons," he wrote, "are sadly lacking in corrosion resistance."

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Three weeks later, David Behrendt, a Colt's engineer assigned to Vietnam, mailed audiotapes back to his supervisors. Many M16's were jamming, he said. Almost all were corroded. Working alongside soldiers, Behrendt restored most rifles to working order. But it was not a good sign that a corporate engineer with a bag of parts was required to keep a new rifle in service. Combat equipment was supposed to be hardier than that.

Behrendt noted, too, that the new powder was making the M16 run fast. Engineers had been working on a replacement part — a buffer inside the return spring — that would slow the weapons down. But none were yet in Vietnam. Speaking into a tape recorder halfway around the world, he urged action.

You better get that new buffer over here right pronto to stop some of this malfunction.

Colt's data accumulated. Another rep in Vietnam, J. B. Hall, summed matters up. Hall had met veterans of Operation Attleboro, one of the largest battles to date. The operation had been a startling experience. Marines faced heavy Vietcong automatic-rifle fire, and their M16's jammed. "There is no question that soldiers in Vietnam are losing confidence in the M16 rifle," Hall wrote. "It is imperative that we take all steps possible to correct the situation." Hall's report was the most urgent. It included a list: Plate the bore and chamber with chromium, install heavier buffers, correct the corrosion problems on receivers and barrels, and find a way to cover the magazines when not being fired. He offered a recommendation: "a crash program to provide a better weapon."

A little more than two weeks later, the latest news of the M16's poor performance reached the top of the Army. Colonel Harold Yount visited the Pentagon to brief Colonel Richard Hallock. Hallock's interest in the M16 was zealous and personal. He had been an early supporter of the rifle, and more than four years before he had been a supervisor of Project AGILE — a secret combat test with Vietnamese soldiers wielding AR-15's that had given the new weapon much of its early internal military hype. The meeting marked a potentially agonizing moment. The weapon he had advocated was failing, and as near as he could tell, the failures were getting American soldiers killed. What to do? Hallock filed a classified memo detailing the meeting. It left no doubt that the Army had long understood the scope and nature of the M16's problems, had done little to resolve them, and still was moving slowly to help soldiers in Vietnam.

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I asked if he had a plan to retrofit the weapons in the field with this buffer and he said he did not. First production of the new buffer, he said, would be in January and they would go on new weapons. He said that if the buffers were sent to the field for the old weapons they would not be available to go on the new weapons that also are going to the field. I asked if he had plans to get a special priority to increase the production rate and speed up availability of the buffer and he apparently did not. I also asked about clearing up the fouling caused by ball powder. He did not say that anything definitive had been done to correct the problem.

I asked him if there were any reports yet from Vietnam indicating the occurrence, in fact, of the excessive malfunctions that one would expect... . He said there were some, but didn't elaborate.

Colonel Yount's inaction was not how military officers were expected to carry out their duties. Colonel Hallock wanted the problems remedied. But he was equally interested in restricting who knew of them. There was a scandal to contain, even if it meant limiting the number of technicians working to fix the malfunctions. Colonel Hallock impressed upon his peer the need to keep quiet. After returning to his office, Colonel Yount made a change. As of November 29, his weekly "significant action report" as head of the office managing the M16 carried a new line: "The report must not be reproduced, filed or referenced in any official correspondence." Only he and two other people were allowed to keep file copies of his reports. "All other copies," he wrote, "will be destroyed within 10 days of receipt." At a time when the M16 program desperately needed candor, attention, and more resources, and when commanders and troops in the field should have been informed of the problems emerging in Vietnam, another cover-up had begun.

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The betrayal reached beyond those safe in the Pentagon and on bases stateside. A din of complaints about M16 jamming was rising from the ranks. But the replies of generals in Vietnam mixed paternalistic denials that the M16 was failing with strong defenses of the weapon's merits. Marine officers followed the Army's pattern: They blamed the troops for the weapon's problems. At a press conference in Da Nang just after the battles for Hills 861 and 881, one commander, Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt of the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force, delivered a classic performance of an officer who has lost touch with his men. First he declared that the Marines in his command were "100 percent sold" on the M16. Most of those who had relied on the weapon in battle, he added, "have nothing but praise for it." This can only be read as a lie. General Walt pressed on. He put blame for malfunctions squarely upon individual Marines and their NCOs and officers, saying they had either not adequately maintained their rifles or had tried to force too many rounds into their magazines. This was a slap at men at war. In a resonant slip of the tongue, General Walt added that "rumors" of unsatisfactory M16 performance were started "by a very, very small majority." Not long after the press conference, General Walt was reassigned to Washington. In July, the month of Operation Bear Chain, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Wallace Greene, repeated General Walt's position, calling the M16 "ideally suited" for Vietnam. The brass had set a tone. With the generals standing behind the M16, complaints had little chance of finding a supporting audience. The Marines in Vietnam were on their own.

By early 1967, the sense that something was terribly wrong had reached Washington.

Angry troops were sending home letters. Journalists were hearing complaints. Reports of the AK-47's reliability were also providing an obvious contrast. The Washington Daily News posed the question.

In the past two years, with amazing competence and thoroness [sic], the communists have replaced their earlier inferior weapons with the rapid firing AK-47 automatic assault rifle of Soviet design and Red Chinese manufacture... . The AK-47 ... is as good as the new M-16 rifle U. S. troops use. It is less liable to jam and therefore, in the opinion of some experts, may even be better... . Why is it that North Vietnam, with aid from its Chinese ally, could foresee the need and meet it, despite all sorts of obstacles? Why is it that the U. S., with its $25 billion to $30 billion yearly war budget, superlative defense plants, and reputed logistic superiority, could not keep pace?

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By spring 1967, the problems had become so widely known that Congress took an interest. On May 3, 1967, Representative L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, appointed Representative Richard H. Ichord as head of a special subcommittee to examine the "development, production, distribution and sale of M-16 rifles." Ichord steered wide of the question of which weapon was better — the M14 or the M16. If the military wanted the M16, so be it. He wanted to know why the M16 was malfunctioning at an unacceptably high rate.

One rifle-failure incident after another eroded public confidence. Senator Peter H. Dominick of Colorado visited Vietnam that May. He inquired about the M16. He was told it was a good weapon. Someone produced an M16 and handed it to the senator, who tried to fire it. It jammed. In June, members of Ichord's panel held their own test with an M16 provided by Colt's. If any one M16 might have been expected to perform flawlessly, this should have been it: the test rifle a manufacturer facing congressional investigation presented as a sample to Congress. The subcommittee's rifle jammed several times. No one needed to be told what this might mean in combat. But another GI crystallized for the congressmen a particular species of nightmare: The other night we got a radio message from one of our night ambushes... . The last words they said were, "out of hand grenades, all weapons jammed." The next morning when they got to them, their hands were all skinned up and cut and their stocks on their rifles were all broken from using them as clubs.

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Out in the field beside Ap Sieu Quan, Private First Class Nickelson worked on his jammed rifle. He had given away his position by firing.

Bullets raked the grass nearby. He reached for a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it as far as he could toward the trees; he hoped its blast would divert the attention of the enemy soldiers. After the explosion, he removed his rifle's magazine and pulled back on the charging handle to look inside the chamber. The empty cartridge was stuck there. He cursed again and reached for his cleaning rod. Around him was chaos. Nickelson pushed the rod down the muzzle and knocked the empty cartridge case clear. He returned the magazine to its place and chambered a second round. Again he looked up and spotted the North Vietnamese soldier in the tree line. The man was on his stomach, prone and firing out. Nickelson aimed his M16 and eased back on the trigger again. Firing on automatic, he hoped to hit the man multiple times. The first bullet hit the soldier in the left leg. He watched him roll out of sight into the bushes. But Nickelson could not finish him.

His rifle had jammed again.

Just as it had on Hill 881, Hotel Company fell back. Aircraft and artillery hit the village. The company moved forward later, after the NVA had slipped away. Hotel Company had suffered miserably once more. Five Marines were dead, thirty were wounded. Nickelson had survived. He rose to his feet but left his jammed rifle in the dirt. He had shipped to Vietnam a month before. Until that day, he had never handled this kind of rifle. In the United States, he had trained on an M14. In his one previous firefight, his M16 had jammed, too — after firing a single round. Nickelson was new to war, but he was no fool. A rifle that failed in battle was worse than useless. It was detestable. As far as he was concerned, it was a discard. Upon arriving in-country, Nickelson had bought a .38 revolver from a soldier who was rotating home — part of an underground market for troops arming themselves with personal weapons as insurance against the failures of their issued guns.

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Now an officer ordered him to pick up his M16. "Fuck you," Nickelson said. He would never carry an M16 again.

Back on board the USS Tripoli after Hotel Company left Ap Sieu Quan, the company's executive officer, Lieutenant Michael Chervenak, seethed. Chervenak was a man who followed his own compass. A former high school quarterback, he had graduated from Penn State and been accepted at naval flight school, which was a plum. He wanted to fly jets. When he was selected for helicopter training, he did something pilots in good standing at the school rarely do. He quit, and asked for orders to the infantry in Vietnam. He was new to Hotel Company and had replaced an officer who was shot through the head on Hill 881. When he arrived, he heard of the M16's problems but reserved judgment until he had been in combat with the rifles himself. After Ap Sieu Quan, he was in a state of quiet rage. He cleaned up and visited the stateroom where Captain Richard Culver, his company commander, was bunking. The officers discussed the M16's malfunctions. The lieutenant wanted advice. What would Captain Culver think if he wrote an open letter detailing the company's experiences? The Marine Corps was not helping its Marines. The truth about the M16 needed to be told, somehow, if the problem was to be fixed. Captain Culver, a former enlisted man, was the son of a Marine. His father enlisted in 1918 at age fifteen. Raised on bases, commanding a company at war, he was more than reluctant to speak outside the chain of command. But he knew this young officer was right. Writing a letter, he told him, was a good idea.

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Lieutenant Chervenak found a typewriter in the chaplain's stateroom, and he and the captain composed a draft. When they finished, he climbed belowdecks to the enlisted quarters and asked Staff Sergeant Elrod to read it.

I am a Marine First Lieutenant and have been serving in a rifle company in Vietnam since the 15th of May. Ever since my arrival, immediately following the battle of hill 881, one controversy has loomed above all others — that of the M16 rifle.

I feel that it is my duty and responsibility to report the truth about this rifle as I have seen it. My conscience will not let me rest...

We are constantly told that improper cleaning and unfamiliarity with the weapon cause any malfunction which may occur. Any rifle that requires cleaning to the degree they speak of has no place as a combat weapon. I believe that the cold, hard facts about the M_16 are clouded over by a fabrication of the truth for political and financial considerations. I have seen too many marines hiding behind a paddy dike trying to clear their rifle to accept those explanations any longer.

Our battalion has test fired these rifles on numerous occasions, aboard the ship and in the field, to try to find a solution to this problem. All rifles were cleaned and inspected prior to these tests.

Having supervised several of these tests, I will swear to the fact that at least 25 to 40% of the rifles malfunctioned at least once under these optimum conditions.

During a recent fight on the 21st of July, no fewer than 40 men in my company reported to me that their rifles had malfunctioned because of failure to extract. Because of these inoperative rifles we were severely hampered in our efforts to extract a platoon which had been pinned down. Lack of sufficient firepower also caused us great difficulty in getting our casualties out. Having 40 rifles malfunction in any rifle company is a serious matter, and in an understrengthened company such as ours, the gravity of the situation is greatly increased...

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I do not mean for this letter to slap at my battalion, the Marine Corps, the Colt Manufacturing Company, the Defense Department or anyone else concerned. It is written out of concern for the safety of the men in my company and of the great morale problem that the M16 causes. I will stand and stake my reputation on the fact that we have had men wounded and perhaps killed because of inoperative rifles...

The search for the truth is paramount in all of us and I ask you to look into this problem and search for the truth there ... this problem has been overlooked too long and too many attempts have been made to gloss over a situation that endangers the lives of men.

Staff Sergeant Elrod finished the letter. He had served ten years, had seen lieutenants come and go, and had a strong sense of how the officer ranks worked. Loyalty, by his read, meant working hard and shutting up. He liked the letter very much. "Hey, sir?" he said. "You're not planning to make the Marine Corps a career, are you?"

On July 27, Lieutenant Chervenak mailed four copies of the letter. He sent one to The Barnesboro Star, his hometown newspaper in Pennsylvania. He mailed another to The Washington Post. The last two went to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Representative Ichord. On each he signed his name officially. In all the available records surrounding the bloody introduction of the M16, this stands as one of the few brave and candidly honest acts. It fell to a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, his unit repeatedly thinned by casualties, to stake his name on the truth.

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Courtesy of anonymous former officer

Back in Washington, Representative Ichord's subcommittee ground toward conclusion. The Army had stonewalled the investigation, but the congressmen understood viscerally that the M16's performance in Vietnam was much worse than acknowledged. On October 19 the subcommittee published a scalding report. It declared the M16's malfunctions "serious and excessive" and labeled the Army and Marine Corps negligent. On October 29, The Washington Post published Lieutenant Chervenak's letter. His words had an instant effect. The corps opened an investigation — not into the causes of the rifle's failures or the slow reaction by the chain of command to troops' complaints but into the officer who dared to write to the Post.

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On December 3, a pair of representatives from Colt's and the Marine Corps caught up with the battalion at a base outside Da Nang. They had been ordered to follow up on the lieutenant's allegations. Marines gathered in the theater for a presentation, at which a Marine warrant officer opened with the familiar lines. He told his audience that the M16 was a good rifle, and if it was failing, it was because they were not cleaning it adequately. The Marines shouted and jeered. The battalion commander demanded quiet. The representative from Colt's, Kanemitsu Ito, was shaken by their fury.

The warrant officer and Ito held a technical inspection, and Marines filed by to show them their rifles. Ito was a decorated Koreanwar veteran himself, and a former test officer in the Army. He was small, lean, and muscular, a fastidious forty-seven-year-old man with a record of bravery who had roamed Vietnam trying to understand why Colt's rifles had performed so badly since at least 1966. He was conscientious to an almost excruciating degree. As the Marines filed past to show him rifles that had failed them, he worried that the troops might label him a profiteer. After all, he thought, every rifle to be replaced might be seen as another sale for Colt's. He decided to let the warrant officer do the talking. Quietly, he watched. That night, emotionally and physically exhausted, Ito typed a letter and sent it back to Colt's. He had news. What Lieutenant Chervenak had written to the Post was not quite right. Matters were actually much worse — Ito and the warrant officer had condemned sixty-seven of the company's eightyfive M16's.

I walked into a den of angry, feroucious [sic] lions when I visited the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marines. It was really a touchy situation. I would never ask anyone else to be in the situation I was in. The officers and a great majority of the men hated the M_16A1 rifles. They had a right to hate it.

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Ito had been telling his bosses at Colt's in clear terms for more than a year that the M16 had real problems, and now he knew that these problems were worse than what the military or Colt's had ever publicly said. On December 28, Ito and Paul Benke, Colt's president, met at the Pentagon with officers involved in the M16 program. Ito's presentation was direct: The new buffers were reaching many units, but severe problems persisted. About 70 percent of the rifles in the Marines' possession, he said, "should be condemned due to pitted chambers."

Benke, the man who ran Colt's Firearms, would get the last word. The reports of problems, he said, even when supported by his own engineer fresh from Vietnam, were "hearsay."

Several months after the fight for Ap Sieu Quan, Staff Sergeant Elrod became the battalion's intelligence chief, and was meritoriously promoted. One day in spring 1968, after a skirmish in a gully near Khe Sanh, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod found an AK-47 beside a dead North Vietnamese soldier. He claimed it as his own. This was not a trophy. It was a tool. Now he had a rifle he could depend on. The AK-47 did not solve all his problems. It solved one problem but replaced it with another. There was a special danger related to carrying the enemy's weapon: The M16 and the AK-47 have distinctly different sounds. Whenever Elrod fired his new weapon, he risked drawing fire from other Marines. He considered this less of a risk than carrying a rifle that might not fire at all.

A few weeks later, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod was walking across a forward operating base near Khe Sanh with his AK-47 slung across his back.

A lieutenant colonel stopped him.

"Gunny, why the hell are you carrying that?" he asked.

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"Because it works," Elrod replied.

Epilogue

Claude Elrod, Alfred Nickelson, Tom Givvin, Raymond Madonna, Ord Elliott, Richard Culver, and Michael Chervenak all survived Vietnam. Elrod, Madonna, and Culver went on to serve full careers. Chervenak, who spoke out publicly against the M16, was reprimanded in writing and his promotion to the rank of captain was delayed a year, which effectively docked his pay. (Promotion to captain is an achievement usually so simple that the test, many Marines say, is to serve the requisite time and be able to "fog a mirror.") He left the Marine Corps, attended law school, and had a successful career in private practice. Colt's Firearms no longer exists. Paul Benke, the president of Colt's during the bungled rollout of the M16, continues to defend the rifle and Colt's behavior, saying he and the company only wanted to provide the best weapons possible to troops at war.

The M16 and its ammunition were changed and modified repeatedly in the months and years after the uproar of 1967. The current firm, Colt Defense LLC, provides rifles to the American military and to many government organizations around the world. Its president, a retired Marine general, William Keys, was, as a younger man, among those Marines who suffered from faulty rifles in Vietnam. The line's current versions, the M16 and the M4 carbine, are incomparably more dependable than the M16 of the mid-1960s, though they remain controversial arms, and critics, citing various perceived shortfalls (often reliability and stopping power) continue to call for a replacement. Many of the complaints have been over the standard ammunition that the American military's M16's and M4's fire, which troops have reported passes too easily through lightly clad Afghan and Iraqi men and often fails to deliver incapacitating wounds.

The AK-47 and Type 56 rifles, two variants of the Kalashnikov that were common in the early years of the Vietnam War, have largely been phased out and replaced by an extended family of descendants that were made in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, the former Warsaw Pact nations, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and other countries. Some of the original rifles are still in use and can readily be found in Afghanistan. Together the entire Kalashnikov line — routinely and erroneously called AK-47's — are the most abundant firearm on earth, and the predominant weapon of war today.

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